Do you want me to take the first crack? Okay.
No technology will be perfect. That's something the committee should understand, not only for this committee, but any study. For any technology, it's simply a function of time before it breaks down—any secure system. It could be a matter of seconds, it could be a matter of years, depending on the security infrastructure that's there.
Will mistakes happen? Yes, mistakes do happen. Of course, I'm not going to name names. I'm going to give an example of where a NEXUS cardholder, someone who has been processed by both countries, has been vetted by both countries, somehow randomly, somewhat frequently, still manages to get four S's on their boarding pass when leaving from a certain airport and not going to a particular other state. The four S's, for people who don't know, is a secondary security threat.
That's a little bit of a problem when you rely solely on the technology to be doing this.
I do not think that tossing away the benefits or the technology writ large of biometrics would be the best of ideas. It's an evolution of how we do identity, and I think the Admiral explained that quite well. We went from tombstone data to photographs to fingerprints. I think the information needs to be secured, with the understanding that it will not be perfect.
So if we're going to invest in these sorts of systems, be it information sharing between departments or biometrics, we have an inherent responsibility also to safeguard the systems, the databases, the infrastructure that they are predicated on.
Again, any sort of database—and this is a great example—becomes a target for others. So we have a responsibility, as we're collecting personal information, that while we do use it to verify and make sure that the right people are coming here, we need to protect it.
This is just my last point before I pass it over to the Admiral.
Starting a biometric file on someone or starting a file at all on someone when they just show up to our border doesn't really do much. We need to know more about the person before they actually come to us. I could just show up, for example, to the United States and give a fingerprint scan. If there's nothing to talk about—George Platsis or this fingerprint or this retina—the file starts there.